There is one kind of shortage though, and one that is adequately compensated; programmers willing to work at below average wages for lottery tickets (read: technical cofounder equity) that happen to hit, and therefore end up making millions -- they don't even need to be exceptionally skilled, just right be in the place and right time (I've known several of these). But show me an Anthony Davis of coding who is paid as such, and I'll show you someone who is a skilled manager/entreprenuer.
Let's also consider that the middle management layer is earning 2x and upper management at least 3x a senior developer who's stuck somewhere in the 100k range. Trim the fat and you can have as many developers as you want.
it's about time for (good) engineers to get an appropriate share of the pie.
Now businesses have to either pay for training (which can take years and is expensive) or pay enough to encourage people to get into complex software dev for the money.
If you go the second route the starting salary needs to be six figures and needs to go up to 500k+ just like for lawyers and doctors.
a) US companies will hire those remote workers, causing cash to flow out of the US
b) companies will set up in those countries to compete with the US companies, but without the burden of the US' skyrocketing salaries.
This happened in manufacturing: the US had high salaries, so costs of manufacturing were too high, so the US started outsourcing to Asian, and now the manufacturing industry in the US is so bad that companies can actually afford to hire US manufacturing workers again.
The solution: when wages skyrocket, bring in foreign engineers. When wages are depressed, don't.
Isn't this pretty soundly debunked at this point? Honest question because I hear alternately "US manufacturing is dead" and "US manufactures more crap than anyone else except China, barely". I get the sense that saying the US manufacturing industry is dead because it doesn't employ many people, is the same as saying the US agriculture industry is dead for the same reason, and also wrong for the same reason (i.e. number of people employed is a weak metric for the strength of an industry).
nope. you are mistaken, nothing keeps companies in any specific place except opportunities. With labor prices so cheap in Asia, what would stop company to just move all production off shore like they did for electronics?
they are trying, have tried and will try again countless time to outsource tech jobs, but it will take more years for them to figure out the quality issues they're having in doing so.
anyway it's not like oversea there are millions of great coders and engineers just waiting to code for food. STEMSs tend to be of higher education overall, which makes exploiting them harder.
Most US companies won't even hire remote workers here.
I'm not saying we have one. But I'm also suspicious of the self-serving opinions that rank-and-file developer salaries ought to be 10x higher.
How much more? $250,000? $500,000? $1,000,000? $3,000,000?
Sure, it is plausible that if all the companies in SF tried to pay virtually unlimited amount of money for exceptional programmers, they'd eventually run out of those programmers. After all even in major league baseball there are only so many 100 MPH pitchers to go around. But it's hard to credit claims that we are in that situation rather than one where the money _is_ the issue, when you aren't seeing numbers that would make a BigLaw junior partner or investment bank managing director jealous, much less a professional baseball player.